If your mom was a terrible cook — write about it!

My mom was a terrible cook. Well, maybe not terrible, but she was not well suited for the job. My brother said it was the reason he was so skinny as a kid. He swears we ate pancakes nearly every night for “supper.”

I remember eating pancakes some of the time. I liked pancakes. Still do. I also remember a good deal of cornbread, which our dad ate with sugar and milk. I liked cornbread. Still do.

My brother, not so much.

Our mom’s family was poor, so they probably had a lot of pancakes and cornbread in their diet. Plus, from the time that I started school, she worked full-time in the hardware store. Full-time was 60-plus hours a week.

Pancakes and cornbread were easy fixings after a 10-hour workday.

“Don’t forget the popcorn,” says my brother. Yup, we ate lots of popcorn. I liked popcorn. Still do.

Mom often said that cooking was really chemistry, but she did things with meat that nature never intended. The kitchen is not the place to create molecular bonded shell. If you’ve  ever watched “Knight Rider,” that’s what KITT was made of.

We ate nearly blackened bacon. And on occasion, pork chops that gave your jaws an aerobic workout. Some people get meat sweats, but we got mandible sweats.

My brother says that her roasts “came out of the oven as black as the ace of spades.” We had roast???? When did we have roast?

His particular meat peeve, though, on the nights when we didn’t have pancakes or cornbread, was hamburger crumbles. You say you want the recipe?

Here ya go. HAMBURGER CRUMBLES: Brown, and I mean BROWN, a pound of ground beef in a non-stick frying pan. Use almost no fat. The meat will stick to the pan. This is the intended method. Stir and stir until the meat breaks down into crunchy, miniscule bits of very dark mini-marbles. You can try to eat it with a fork, but you’ll have more success with a spoon.

Served with ketchup, it was nearly edible. Well, we probably had “catsup,” a Brand X knockoff of Heinz. And we didn’t have buns, so we’d have to put the catsupy crumbles between slices of bread.

Did this make her a bad cook? Yes, but I give her a pass. I think she was trying to be a safe cook. When my mom was young, her brother passed a pork tapeworm, and she never forgot him yelling, “Something’s coming out of me!”

In truth, undercooked pork can make you sick, and she must have felt that even a tinge of pink hamburger was equally dangerous. Cooking meat, for her, was a life-or-death matter.

 I also give her a pass because I don’t think my taste buds are as acute as my brother’s. He has always appreciated finer food and drink, and he married a great cook. He’s no slouch himself.

I’ve learned what good beef and pork taste like, and I appreciate a fine restaurant meal, but, at heart, I’m still a peanut butter-and-jelly kind of gal. I don’t buy the off brands like our mom did, though. I do have a few standards.

Here’s a fun fact: Since 2013, Skippy Peanut Butter has been owned by Hormel. Yup, the same people who make Spam, and that is another thing we ate a lot of, probably because mom trusted that it wouldn’t give us tapeworms. And she didn’t have to incinerate it.

The smell of pan-fried Spam still sets my mouth watering, but my gall bladder has caution tape all over it when it comes to that product. Hawaiians have elevated Spam into haute cuisine, grilling it, wrapping it with seaweed and setting it on a block of rice. They call it Spam musubi, and that’s some sushi I could get behind if my gall bladder would agree.

Spam or no Spam, our parents weren’t people who grilled. There was a time when the gas utility company sold people a gas grill for the patio and threw in a stylish gas pole light for their front yard. Our neighbors had one such set-up, and I thought they were rich.

The neighbors cooked all kinds of good meat (steak!) while we ate our hamburger crumbles. I’ll admit it didn’t look super fun to grill in January, wearing a parka, but that front yard light looked great in all weathers.

Joan Zwagerman’s brother excels at grilling. She does not.